
ARACHNIDAEA: LINE DRAWINGS
I.
Extravagance at dawn ―
your finest threads are strung with pearls
and you, a brooch with a clasp.
Magnify the shiny spheres
to divine that each conceals
a miniature, an image
of struggling wings, of life undone.
Pass at the critical angle,
and they flash and snap in the sun.
II.
These haunts are hung haphazardly
with votive offerings, each sucked dry;
paper maché sarcophagi,
cruel chrysalis for moth or butterfly.
III.
Serial killer.
Insecticide, the skill
in which you specialize.
Can we call it murder if nerves connect
not to brain but to canister, chain and gear,
if the dumb drive to survive directs
your every move? Or is it fear
that fuels your addiction to others’ pain,
a numbness spreading through the vein
as you rehearse, again, this ritual play ―
bind and consume in your quick, kinetic way.
IV.
A stickler for particulars,
you’re helpless to repel
the pull of perpendicular
the lure of parallel.
Do lines and circles insulate?
Can order keep at bay
the random drafts that propagate
contagion, death, decay?
The cords are taut. You draw control
from patterns meant to thwart
unraveling, but the tension takes its toll
on the mental weft and warp.
V.
A concert in the round!
Divertimenti scored for eight short hands
will be played by the maestro
for adoring fans.
The fine fretwork glistens.
The strings tune and go still.
Once in motion,
you dazzle in the parts for pizzicato,
leap with ease over fourths and fifths,
scuttle up scales to a dizzying height
then plummet, by octaves, to the sublime.
All are amused, for a time.
The circle is crossed by chords,
point to counterpoint,
illusions of balance, of words.
Listen to the last mournful strains
murmuring a requiem for the days.
VI.
The hours molt and fall away;
the year grows late.
Your web’s worn watch face ticks in whispers
and you pray that you will hibernate but briefly
and somehow wake.
As if by grace, the breaths of winter
fog the panes,
leave no trace
of love
or joy
or even hate.
There are, in the end,
only the frayed strands of time,
the failing light
and you, splayed at the center,
condemned to wait.
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SEEDS
A goldfinch whose yellow rivals the sun
could cull any bloom this garden has grown
yet favored a flowering long past blown,
its petals shriveled, stem brittle and dun
in a coneflower patch where just this one
seemed to wither, wilt and ask to be mown.
The bird plucked the seeds ensconced in the cone,
made it sway the way that metronomes run
till time runs out, till the goldfinch has flown.
One flower spent, the perennials sown —
a fête conceived by the dying and done
(though death, it’s said, may breed oblivion).
So many seeds were borne by each alone,
so many lost with loss of those I’ve known.
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LEAVES
For Shinayo Matsumoto
At ninety-one,
she still liked to arrange things
just so,
kept her possessions in tidy boxes,
some engraved with Asian motifs ―
dragonflies, exotic birds,
and leaves of bamboo.
And how she loved her sumo!
To watch, on the Japanese channel,
rikishi ten times her size
colliding like forces of nature
filled her with a sense of nostalgia
and possibility.
She was the venerable priestess of tea.
In the autumn of her age,
faithful to the rituals
of a dying art,
she distilled from the parched leaves
this pure nectar,
green as youth.
Flowers found perfection
in her hands,
wrinkled hands, with fingers like twigs.
Once, perhaps, as she trimmed the leaves,
she remembered a time when she
was that perfect flower,
blooming in her kimono
of peach and green.
Her family arranged
a simple Buddhist ceremony.
In late November, the trees
were mostly bare.
But across the lawn, beyond
the small gathering
and the somber stones,
the leaves all danced in the air.
*******************************************************************************
SYRINGE
Syrinx was a chaste water nymph who, pursued by Pan,
was mercifully transformed into hollow reeds.
By all accounts, she knew nothing of multiple sclerosis.
I.
These marks, my metric
of defiance and decline,
gauge a meniscus as the lumen fills
with fresh platoons of synthetic drug,
game as ever to deploy.
But what draws my eye this time
is the glint of syringe
― that crack in the slats where sun leaks through ―
I pry the blinds,
peer in
II.
As if the brain were lit by a strobe, flickering
between real and not, between now
and some taproot of time,
as if the temporal lobe had seized
on this pool in the skin, this fluid lens,
and telescoped instead
to a pond near woods
with frogs and nymphs and fish,
and by the water’s edge
a stand of reeds ― horsetail, I surmise, cauda equina ―
piercing the surface like needles
No plunger
drives the sun to its zenith,
retracts the shadows of trees,
pressures the breeze
to be wind,
nor does the mind,
which thinks it sees
the white coats of birches
but is more akin
to that orange disc climbing through branches
synaptic in all the circuitry
Nights,
when ripples are obsidian,
the moon
spills across the surface,
scatters a flotilla of lights
whose oily spangles buoy, conjoin,
yet always part
And here, in that timeless dark,
Syrinx appears,
a synthesis of moons
sheathed in halos of myelin film,
the flutings whorled
around her waist
like petals,
that place
where now she glides
an arm, the wrist turned in,
and effortlessly loosens the ties
that linens might slip from her skin
III.
This bloating sloughs
like fat off bone.
I return to burned-out husks
the columns collapsed
the cry of syllables
huddled in shelters
each vowel a child dragging its feet.
Where wires are down
a wireless crackles
and static animates the screen,
save for this glimpse of a green frog in my fist
and the teacher saying insert the needle here,
between the vertebrae,
then wiggle back and forth
to pith the cord
My reeds become water,
my memories
myth
Comments
Beautifully-crafted poetry…
Beautifully-crafted poetry should leave us in a state of wonder: not because we have failed to grasp its meaning but because the writer has touched the heart of our being and left a mark. A wonderful selection of poems that reflect more than an understanding of how poetry works but how it is crafted, shaped and moulded by language.
This is such a cool and…
This is such a cool and clever piece! The imagery is sharp. Totally memorable and refreshingly different.